On Thu, 26 Mar 2020 at 22:11, Cameron Simpson <c...@cskk.id.au> wrote: > > It seems to me that there is a deliberate choice to _not_ install the > "python3" executable name when installing Python 3 on Windows, and to my > eye that is/was a _bad_ choice. I would like to see a good explaination > as to why that choice was made.
I don't think that's quite right. Originally, the choice was to install "python", and that was it. That was true on Unix as well. When Python 3 came along, Unix needed to have both python (=python 2) and python3. But the reasons for that (distros using python 2 for system scripts) didn't apply on Windows, so there was no need for a change there. Maybe that was a mistake, and compatibility with Unix should have been seen as more important than maintaining the existing model on Windows. But IMO, it wasn't so much a deliberate choice to not provide python3, more of a lack of any decision to do so. The fact that the situation hasn't been reviewed, and hasn't been changed, is likely mostly just inertia. That, plus the fact that there simply haven't been that many complaints. Sure, this thread has generated a lot of discussion, but it's just one thread, triggered by one poster with a very specific situation. I'm not saying that we should ignore the issue - I doubt that shipping a python3.exe is a huge effort in practice - but I'm not aware that this is as widespread an issue as all that. So honestly, I don't think there's any useful information or explanation to be had from the history. Unless there's been a previous request to add python3.exe that got blocked, I think we just sort of got here by *not* making any specific decisions. > Choosing Python 3 specificly is an important choice for many scripts > because 2->3 was a breaking change. Well, certainly for some scripts. But not * If you don't share your script * If you only share scripts between people using the same Python version * If you only use a single OS (you can use OS-specific approaches to choose a Python version) * If you bundle your script into a wheel or application It's really only scripts that need to be shared as simple scripts between machines with a variety of operating systems and a variety of Python versions that have a really difficult problem to address here. I don't know what proportion of scripts that would be. However, I also don't see that how many scripts are affected is any reason *not* to make things easier for them, if doing so is straightforward. Maybe someone should just raise a PR for 3.9, to include versioned exes in the Windows installers (and the various other Windows distributions)? If there *are* any good reasons to object, they'd come up in PR review, I imagine. Paul _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list -- python-ideas@python.org To unsubscribe send an email to python-ideas-le...@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/python-ideas.python.org/ Message archived at https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-ideas@python.org/message/KAV3FEL2D4G2A34IMG3IR5WFVFHF3EZ4/ Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
